Peaks and ravines

[desperance]

Funny things, moods. Two days ago, I was being wonderfully positive; I had a plan, a project, not exactly a career-saver but at least something to keep me busy while I waited to find out if I still had a career.

Yesterday? Pffft. Nothing can save me, so what's the point?

Today: halfway houses. This new thing is of course not new, it's a kids' book that I was talking to a publisher about last year. Mild interest (his, you understand, not mine: I love all my babies) was not at that time enough to hurl me into it; mild interest coupled with panic (mine, you understand, not his: I have never had managed to panic a publisher, so far as I am aware), maybe yes. I should be able to blitz it, anyway, and it's good to be busy. So I shall do that: next month's project, barring anything else getting in the way.

Meantime, though, I did come back from London with a story to write. Thing was, I left Picocon to seek mevennen; and I may not have found her, but on the way I did find a setting. Walking through Hyde Park, down Rotten Row: it's very long, Rotten Row, and it still carries that parade-of-the-fashionable feel to it, even if the fashionable have long since moved on, and it got me thinking...

And then, on my way back to Paddington, I saw a couple of those bicycle-rickshaws that have long been common elsewhere but still look kind of ironic on a London street; and you put the two things together, and suddenly I seem to have a story. Or at least a setting and a set-up, from which narrative may emerge.

So that's what I'm doing right now, though it may be in trouble: five thousand words in, and no narrative is yet emerging. I've got the setting and the set-up nailed, though, and there's time yet. I'm just starting to worry, maybe it wants to be a novella. Another bloody novella. Sigh...

Darling du jour: Art stops short of entanglement, necessarily. The other thing's pornography.

Comments

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

I'm so sorry this has happened. I've been there and bought the t-shirt (with Bantam a couple of years ago) and it sucks. One can and does recover, as you know. Doesn't make it any easier at the time, however.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Mmph. In principle, one recovers. I've been there a couple of times, but I always had a fallback position, doing something else already for a different publisher. This time, I got nothin'. Recovery is - well, problematic. In every sense.

Still'n'all, I can play Micawber for a while: twitching back the curtains, to watch for something turning up.

[synedrian.livejournal.com]

Novella + hacksaw = short story, right? :)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yup. That's the equation. Just, the sound of hacksaw on novella - really sets your teeth on edge, y'know?

[synedrian.livejournal.com]

However, the next day you get a pleasant muscle ache and a sexy, chiselled story. ;)

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Alternatively, series of novellae (novellae? surely...) = novel. Probably cutting edge literary novel, because of how it looks like a series of novellae, but hey...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

This can be true, of course, but not here: 'Rotten Row' is true-brother to the short story, 'Terminal', and maybe by implication half-brother to the other short story, 'Freecell'. So it-and-others would make a linked same-universe collection, but not a novel. And we know how publishers feel about collections these days. Still, I feel differently; which is, of course, why I do these things.

[devonellington.livejournal.com]

You're a bloody brilliant writer, my friend, and this is merely an unfortunate bump in the road.

I'm intrigued by your story.

I saw an article about murdered clowns in the paper today, and that's got my little rusty wheels turning . . .